(The Trouble With) Talking About God

Talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard.

Consider one of the most basic things that theistic religious people say about God: God is the creator of the universe.¹ This statement is so common, so essential to most western religious perspectives, that it may go unconsidered. But what, exactly, are we saying when we say God created² the universe?

The idea of creating something is not itself strange. We humans create things all the time. Right now, I am creating this substack post. Last night, I created a lentil curry. On two separate occasions, my wife and I have created children. So when we talk about God as the creator of the universe, we are likely thinking that God creates more or less like we do.

But if we think about this for a moment or two, questions—and problems—will arise. While it’s true that I can create texts, food, and even new humans, my creative process is hemmed in and limited in all kinds of ways. Let’s consider my skills as a writer. I can create texts in English, but not any other language. I am also pretty decent (I hope!) at creating non-fiction about philosophy and theology, but I have never been able to write fiction, and my poetry is basically just repackaged philosophy and theology.

So I can create writing, but only a very narrow type. But my writing abilities are even more limited than this: in order to write, I need all kinds of things. Not only my own brain and body, of course (which I didn’t always have in the past and won’t always have in the future), but also other physical media. Either a pen and paper, or this laptop I am typing on now. If someone asked me to compose this all in my head, or verbally, but then remember every word verbatim, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even handle a single paragraph that way. A few moments of reflection will reveal similar limits to my abilities as a cook and as a father.

OK, so that’s my creative ability. What about God’s?

Plenty of people have assumed that the creator was, like us, limited in various ways. Plato spoke of a demiurge, for example: a sort of cosmic craftsman who took formless matter, on the one hand, and the eternal forms (basically, the ideas for various kinds of things, sort of like blueprints), on the other, and with them made our material cosmos. This creator worked with what he was given. But this raises obvious questions: where did the forms come from? And what about matter, who made that? 

For Plato, the cosmic creator did not make these fundamental building blocks; they were already present. Indeed, the demiurge himself was generated by something more fundamental than him. So the creator needed to be created, himself—the demiurge was not really the one, true, “high” God, but rather a sort of emanation from a higher and more fundamental reality. But this just kicks the metaphysical can down the road, right? If the demiurge is a local sort of creator, but not the creator of reality as such, we will likely turn our attention to whatever created the demiurge, and rapidly leave the demiurge behind.  What was the first creator, the first “cause”, the original principle? And indeed: when Jews, Christians, and Muslims call God the creator, we are asserting that the creator creates, but is uncreated.

This is why all three Abrahamic faiths have tended to embrace the principle of creatio ex nihilo—that is, that God created the world from nothing.³ God creates not just this cosmos, but also the matter and forms out of which this world is created. Even abstract things, like causation itself, or mathematics, are understood in Abrahamic theology as creatures, that is, as things created: contingent things which derive their existence from something other than themselves.

Notice, then, how far our description of God as “creator” has diverged from our regular, everyday human understanding of the word. We saw above that when I create, I do so only under severe limitations: whether I am writing, cooking, or procreating, I take a variety of already existing things, and turn them into something else. That’s impressive, in its own right! But it’s nothing at all compared to God’s act as creator, in which God takes nothing and turns it into something, using nothing at all except God’s own power, self, and actuality.

So: when we use the word “creator” to refer to God, we don’t really mean the word in the same way that we use that word to refer to humans. The word has one meaning when applied to us, and a related—but quite distinct—meaning when applied to God.⁴

But this strange linguistic alchemy happens not only with that particular word, “creator”. Consider, for example, the word “good”. We religious types love referring to God as good.⁵ But a comparison is, again, in order, because we can call all manner of things good. For example, a meal can be good, a movie can be good, a dog can be good, and a person can be good (supposedly!). But obviously, what makes a pie good—texture, flavor, nutrition, etc.—is rather different from what makes a movie good—cinematography, believability of acting, concise and densely packed dialogue, etc. etc. And, of course, a dog’s goodness is altogether different as well; we might look for loyalty, gentleness, playfulness, etc. When it comes to humans, the meaning of goodness gets even broader and denser all at once: we might look for kindness, or honesty, intelligence, a work ethic, courage, etc.

So, if  the word good can mean so many different things, even among created things, we might already intuit that applying it to God is going to be tricky. And indeed, I don’t think that when we say that God is good we mean that God has a good texture, or that the camera angles showing God are particularly flattering. We might think that our descriptions of dogs and humans get us closer to what we mean, but I’m not so sure. Is God loyal? If so, to whom? To me, or to you? To us, or to our enemies? God may be gentle, but that’s not immediately apparent, considering the nature of our world. So what do we mean?

In fact, the problem of calling God good runs even deeper than any of this. Riffing on Plato’s Euthyphro, the influential Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz famously asked “[is what is good and just] good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just?”⁶ In other words, does God like what is good because it is good, or is something good just because God says so? If we offer the former answer, then goodness seems to be something logically prior to God, and then we are kicking our metaphysical can down the road again: what, or who, created that goodness, if it wasn’t God? Yet if we offer the second answer, some worry that goodness becomes arbitrary; could God have chosen to make what we now consider bad to be good? If so, then goodness seems to lose all real meaning.

Now, one solution that western theology took to resolve this conundrum is simple, but also radical.⁷ Certain middle Platonists and Neoplatonists asserted that God simply is the Good.⁸ That is, God is not good; instead God is goodness itself. Here, the adjective is transformed into a noun; it is no longer some kind of property that God has, it is rather another way of referring to the reality that God is. Understood this way, Leibniz’s question above loses meaning and force. God neither receives the idea of goodness from elsewhere nor does God arbitrarily determine what is good. Instead, goodness is simply another way of referring to God as such.⁹

Now, I happen to think this is true. But there is no denying that, again, we find our language melting in our hands: we can not think that God’s goodness is the same as a pie’s goodness, or a movie’s, or a dog’s, or even a human’s because God is that goodness. I might be good, on my best days, but I am not goodness itself. Goodness is a property I can have, but it’s not some state that I just automatically am. So, as with “creating”, our language has to be profoundly changed in order for us to speak about God at all.

This is really just a long-winded way of saying something that is perhaps obvious, but which I think is often ignored in many religious communities: God is not like anything else we talk about. As different as tables are from chairs and from mountains and from waterfalls and from the abstract idea of the number two, all of these things are infinitely more similar to each other than they are to God. God is utterly unique, uniquely unique. But even this won’t do, because we already know from our experience above that whatever we mean by “unique” won’t apply to God in the same way we apply it to ourselves, each other, or our favorite things. We will end up having to say something like “God is uniqueness itself”, which, while perhaps true, is also a statement the meaning of which just isn’t all that clear.

Even so, I think (and hope) our discussion above has shown that we are logically required to talk about God in this strange, broken, mysterious way. As I said at the outset, talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard. Still, we might take heart that we can still talk about God, even if when we do so we end up basically pronouncing riddles. But having secured this ability, however limited, to talk about God, we will find, strangely enough, there is plenty more to say. Next week, I want to explore the four basic ways that we can try to navigate the difficulty of speaking about God. And then, the week after that, I want to try and draw some deeper conclusions about our relationship with God from this discourse about theological discourse. So: stay tuned!¹⁰

Talking About God

1. I regret to admit that the word “phenomenology” does not appear in today’s post—except, of course, in this very footnote. Here, I want to focus on our use of language. But worry not! There will be phenomenological commentary in later posts in this series.

2. Or, as we shall see, “is creating”.

3. Though, as David Bentley Hart has pointed out, this is probably indistinguishable from saying that God created everything from Godself. But more on this soon.

4. It may be worth noting that I approached the same basic question about theological language over a decade ago on my old blog. The approach was different, but if this topic interests you, it might be worth your time: https://wrestlingwiththeangel.org/talking-about-god/

5. “God is good—all the time; all the time—God is good!”

6.  This quote comes from Leibniz’s Reflections on the Common Concept of Justice

7. As we will discuss next week, not everyone agrees with this solution to the problem.

8. For more on this, see Deirde Carabine’s The Unknown God.

9.  There are obviously a host of implications to this idea that I do want to discuss, but not yet!

10. The attentive reader will no doubt notice that, at 1500 words, this piece is less than half the length of my two previous offerings. My wife has wisely suggested that 4500 word missives might not be the best format for writing about abstract topics on the internet. I will be aiming to break my pieces up into more digestible bites from here on out. Feel free to praise my wife’s merciful wisdom in the comments!